CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++qtvisual-c++
earth
earth

Reputation: 955

Creating a portable, cross-platform, open-source C++ GUI application that works out of the box?

I've been looking around to see how I'd accomplish that which is described in the title. That is, I'd like to create a C++ GUI application that:

I've run into several issues trying to accomplish this. I've narrowed it down to using Qt and NOT using the Visual Studio compiler. Let me explain.

Using Qt would fulfill the cross-platform requirement; it's also highly acclaimed in regard to C++ GUI applications. The issue lies with portability and not having a ton of dependency packages to install before being able to use the application. My goal would be for someone to download a .zip file containing an .exe (and I'd be willing to include other support files e.g. DLLs if necessary) and be able to extract and run that exe out of the box without having to do anything else.

And here's another kicker: as much as I'd like to use Visual Studio (with the Qt Visual Studio Add-in), it just doesn't seem feasible given my requirements. This post covers my issues pretty nicely. Simply put, if I use the Visual Studio compiler, I'd need to either create an installer (no longer a portable app), redistribute some Microsoft DLLs with the app (possible licensing and redist issues here?), or statically link the Visual C++ libraries into the executable (frowned upon technique).

Is there any way to be able to use Visual Studio and fulfill the requirements listed above? Visual Studio is just too fully-featured to pass up. If it's not possible, I think the only other alternatives would be to use a different IDE and/or compiler. For example, I could use QtCreator with MinGW, but then I'd be losing out on some awesome VS debugging features.

My main questions:

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 959

Answers (1)

nshct
nshct

Reputation: 1230

I think your best bet would be to use QT with the MinGW environment. It allows you to create a portable application that supplies runtime DLLs by itself, with added bonus of being completely open source. The QT online installer gives you the option to install the complete MinGW system, and it will work out of the box, not much setup needed.

You could still use Visual Studio for development; there even is a QT plugin for it (I am not sure if VS2015 is supported, but if not that should only take some time).

QTCreator is actually a quite nice IDE, but it cannot stand up to Visual Studio. It is obviously optimized to cater to the needs of QT programmers, but I found that it is quite clunky from time to time. If your project is small it could be a viable choice, but since Visual Studio 2015 Community is basically free I would opt for that. The VS plugin will still use QTCreator's GUI editor though (which is really good)

Upvotes: 1

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